9 Peaks From the Flash Summit

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — I got a view of new uses for flash controllers, the significance of the still invisible Samsung V-NAND and the long road ahead for next-generation non-volatile memory.

Those were my highest peaks at the Flash Memory Summit. I also caught up on the battle over the DRAM bus and the race to pack ever more data into a solid-state drives.

The biggest takeaway was on the breadth and depth of work to turn solid-state drives into processing nodes for big data centers. Specifically, there are efforts afoot to tap into under-used flash controllers to handle distributed computing tasks that include processing core search algorithms such as Hadoop and Map Reduce.

Startup NxGn Data emerged from stealth mode to show its new concepts on the show floor. Its flash controller will use an ARM Cortex A9 running at up to a GHz rather than the more typical Cortex-M or -R cores.

The extra umph will help chips manage up to 8 TBytes of data on an M.2 form factor PCI Express card, that's about the size of a long stick of gum with the extra error correction coding that requires. More importantly, the company outlined a strategy to make the controller a distributed computing node.

Each controller will run a lightweight Linux kernel and a virtual memory container. It will communicate with a host system via a TCP/IP-over-PCIe tunnel. The company claims engineers at a large data center are expressing interest in the concept which essentially creates a second layer of distributed processing in the data center.

NxGn Data has a long way to go and high hurdles along the path. It doesn’t expect to have a working FPGA-based prototype until early next year and no ASIC version until the following fall.

From left, NxGnData execs Richard Mataya, Co-Founder and SVP; Nader Salessi, Founder and CEO; Vladimir Alves, Co-Founder and CTO; James Fife, VP of Business Development

Meanwhile, Samsung formally launched at the event an industry initiative to drive toward this kind of functionality. It said it is helping launch working with multiple groups to draft standards for how this gets done.

Having standards in the area will be important, but Samsung's quick move will shorten any time-to-market advantage for startups like NxGn Data. The concept was first sketched out in a Micron talk at the event a year ago, so lab work on it is likely widespread at this point.

The former flash controller team at Western Digital formed NxGn Data in June 2013. China blocked plans for a full merger of WD and HGST last year, preventing the hard-disk giants from pooling their separate SSD teams and the WD crew drew the short straw.

The only type of NVDIMM that has been mostly agreed upon is also the most common. The NVDIMM contains DRAM and Flash. The system communicates only with the DRAM, so operations happen at DRAM speed. Data is backed up to the Flash. In the event of an unexpected loss of system power, a separate power source such as a super cap provides power long enough for the data to be saved to Flash, so no data is lost.

There will be other variants that for example will allow the system to also communicate with the NVDIMM Flash, but they are still being discussed within JEDEC, and are not fully defined yet.

I am aware of about a dozen companies with NVDIMM products, many of which are currently shipping or sampling.

JEDEC is responsible for the NVDIMM specification and is currently defining multiple different types of NVDIMM. The NVDIMM SIG, within SNIA SSSI, is working with JEDEC on those definitions, and is also focused on educating the market about NVDIMM technology.

Note that the picture of the NVDIMM on slide 6 of this article was taken in the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI) booth at FMS. Members of the NVDIMM Special Interest Group, which was started earlier this year within SSSI, were demonstrating their products. For more information, see www.snia.org/forums/sssi/nvdimm

Thanks for the reality check. I'm guessing--just speculation-- there is not enough enterprise SSD shipments in the busienss channels for IDC to mainignfully count there their may be a few SSDs at retail. Maybe blame it on OEM qual cycles.